Posted
by
timothy
on Monday April 23, 2001 @05:06PM
from the au-naturally dept.

fataugie writes: "Oh yeah, just when you through the economy and Dot.Bombs couldn't suck anymore, we find that the porn business has a place for you. Enjoy!" Not necessarily in front of the cameras, however, but read those contracts carefully.

So I will, I'm rather glad that I have never been
is a position where I have had to consider this as I don't think that ethicaly I could work in the porn biz. Now I have no real problems with other people selling smut. But I don't think I could do it and be able to live the life that I want. I definitly could not face my friends or my family if I did. And I most certainly could not face my Rabbi. So before everyone here desides that there is no difference between selling porn and selling books think about the ethics of it.

No I mean ethics. The basic question is this. Is what I do with my life making the world a better place? There are any number of jobs that I'm sure pay very well and are perfectly legal (Including selling porn) that at least to my mind are not ethical. For example I would not work for a company making censor-ware. Nor would I work for a company that used sweat shops or did any number of other things.

For a large number of reasons I do not feal pornography is a healthy thing in our socity. So while I am not going to say that it should be banned, I am also not going to lift a finger to promote it. Nor would I work for a company that did.

I really think that in the last few years we as a socity have stoped talking about ethics, or when we do the debate is far to shallow. And it does hurt us in ways both large and small.

Well I would say ethics is an absolute, but it does have grey areas. Would working in the Defense industry be ethical? I don't know it rather depends on for whom. I will not say that war is always unethical. In fact I will say quite the oposite, there are times when it would be unethical not to fight. When some thug Somewhere starts killing people en mass (Think Nazi Germany, Kosavo Bosnia etc) It shows a complete lack of ethics to sit on your hands and do nothing. As for biotech companies, you know many of them are working on drugs that can cure diseses or fight hunger on a massive level (The Golden rice).

As for ethics being absolute yes they are. While I make it a point to not push my ethical views on others I do beliive there are some absolutes. If every positon about ethics is equaly valid then the Marxist position that "We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an etenal, ultimate and forever immutable moral law..." Which Karl Marx wrote in his book "Capital". Lenin said similar things. If you accept that moraltiy can be defined as such than the Stalin's Gulag and Pol Pot's killing fields (Both of which in someone's mind advanced the "Class Struggle") were a perfectly acceptable thing. I do not accept that.

plus a couple hundred for the photographer since they usually cost more than the girls

I wonder why. A lot of places seem to have over exposed (as in too much light) photos because cameras left in matrix meter mode on that much untanned flesh tends to meter wrong. Anyone who has photographed nudes in an art class could do better.

Plus they seldom use the rule of thirds, or set the shutter time to pick up motion.

To tie this in with an earlier thread, who else is really making money now? Marijuana seed sellers. Who's going to be making money tomorrow? The same.

Here we have a culture that has outlawed the most basic of human needs: the need to feel good.

It'd sure be nice if everyone would finally just get over the childhood conditioning their parents inflicted on them (because, hey, their parents inflicted it on them, and their parents before them) and finally come to grips with some basic facts of life.

People is gonna fuck, suck, smoke, toke, and get it on it *whatever* ways thrill them.

As long as it doesn't cause harm to others, or other's property, IT AIN'T NOBODY'S BUSINESS IF YOU DO.

If the collective "we" could just get over that hurdle, imagine how much nicer the world would be...

[Inevitably, the ill-informed dupes of the repressive minority will be sure to follow this post with insufferable statements about how masturbation makes you blind, THC makes you rob people, etc.... These are precisely the people who make this society so senselessly repressive.]

I'm obliged to point out that Peter McWilliams is now deceased, killed by the repressive minority twats who insisted he choke on barf rather than supress his vomit reflex by smoking weed during his last ailing years.

When you call "War on Drugs," it always affects other people. Gettaclue.

The journalist's use of "unlikely refuge" really
made me want to just stop reading right there. To anyone who thinks about it for a microsecond, it should plainly be the obvious, MOST LIKELY "refuge". Even the word "refuge" would seem to
imply that it's a temporary situation. This is
more of a Gibraltar, wouldn't you think?

One of the weirdest things about our whole culture
to me is that it's the norm to act embarrased and
surprised about sex, the existance of sex, the fact that people have sex, and above all, SURPRISE! sex sells. To me, it's almost as if
sex would be harder to sell if "we" (society) stopped acting shocked and surprised about porn.

As if, part of the reason it's popular is because
we enable it's mystique by pretending to be innocent, and by pretending that sex is something
that needs to be hidden, restricted only to a certain class of people (e.g., only the marrieds
may participate, and only in the dark even for them), etc.

It just isn't so, but the delusion that it could be, should be, or ever was so, persists as thoroughly as any other cultural idiom in the USA
and much of the world. The very conspicuous absense of any explicit sexual imagery in mainstream media is what creates a market for
erotic material, but that's a topic for another
rant.

Anybody who is genuinely, honestly surprised that
the porn industry thrives, please tell us what cave they've been living in their entire lives.

OK...so now you're saying that if I do not believe that ethics are an absolute then I am a Communist and also endorse mass murder.

My rhetoric is a little rusty - what's the latin for straw man?

A moral/ethical system with no absolute reference point is unable to evaluate any other moral/ethical system, simply because "better" and "worse" are only meaningful (you must see this coming by now) within the context of a moral/ethical system. Your only basis for evaluation is outcomes and results, and the value of an outcome will depend upon (here it comes again) the ethics within which it is evaluated.

The argument is not that "you do not believe in absolute ethics, therefore you are a Communist and a mass murderer", but "you do not believe in absolutes, and as such, your system of ethics can not logically be said to be any better than that of Communists and mass murderers; neither can it be said to be any worse; neither can your system of ethics be used as a rational basis for any sort of meaningful judgement of theirs."

Ask your friendly neighborhood existentialist - the important thing is not the merits of an ethical system itself, but that you choose one. (That the choice is recognized and even heralded as being totally arbitrarily is a non-issue.)

Morals and ethics are not an absolute. Anyone who believes that they are absolute is seriously deluded.

I think a much fairer statement would be: "Anyone who does not believe in an absolutely transcendent god-figure and believes that ethics are absolute is seriously deluded", which agrees with Zachary's point: without an absolute reference point, moral and ethical absolutism is groundless. It is, however, perfectly rational for someone who believes in the reality of such a being to believe morals and ethics could be absolute, in that their genesis is itself an untranscendable absolute.

If you wish to argue that belief in such a being is itself delusional, then your conclusion is consistent. I would quite squarely disagree with you on that point, however:-)

The internet gives people more opportunity than ever before to look at porn without anyone else ever knowing. Someone who wouldn't go to a strip club (for fear of someone seeing his car in the parking lot) or buying a porn mag in a gas station (what if the attendant labels him as a pervert? Oh no!) might dig up porn on the internet. There's no need for direct human contact in the transaction. He's just another string of bits in a database.

Many people are more concerned about their image than they really have reason to be, and porn is one of those things that "decent people" don't want to be associated with. And even those people who look at porn on a regular basis frequently argue against porn so they won't be the one to sound like a pervert. It's one of those dirty little secrets that millions of people have, just like recreational drug use. Most people privately have nothing against porn, but damned if they'll admit it.

Besides, the ultra-conservative types will always scream loudly against anything that anyone could find pleasure in.

I represent the legal department at MasterCard International (www.mastercard.com [mastercard.com]) and must ask you to cease and desist from posting libelous posts on Slashdot.

As a company with valuable intellectual property rights and great stake in the trademark (MasterCard, For everything else there's MasterCard, etc.) it is our legal responsibility to police our trademark to prevent dilution.

If your post is not immediately removed from Slashdot, Messrs. Malda, etc. will be taken to court by MasterCard lawyers. We are giving warning because we are aware of the significance of Slashdot as a community portal.

Those who are willing to pay for pr0n over port 80 are unlikely to have even heard of USENET, let alone know how to use it.

It's a self-selecting sample - anyone aware of NNTP would get their pr0n there, rather than paying bahtama for it.

Of course, bahtama may be at risk of getting nuked for copyright infringement, as the magazine that originally owned those images (or the web site where they were originally posted) could open up a can of whoopass on him.

But with a gazillion small-time sites out there, they'd have to find him first. And remember, he said used it to finance his own website, which implies that it was a small enough site to live comfortably under the radar. So odds are extremely good that he'll get away with it.

Indeed, depending on your views on intellectual property, there may be nothing to "get away with" in the moral sense. Only in the "Don't get sued by a pr0n company with more lawyers than you" sense.

I work in the porn industry. I jumped ship from a fairly large ISP where I was a Senior SysEng, when it started to collapse under the weight of it's own upper management and became a SysEng for a local porn company. This decision was considered, they had been in business for 3 years up to this point, they didn't spam, they didn't flood users with popups, they kept everything above board and legal. The fact that they were dealing with porn didn't really affect my choice, the fact that they were good net.citizens did.

I've now been with this company for over a year, and I must say, it's done wonders for my skills. Why? Because in an ISP environment, things were fairly stagnent (atleast for the company I was with) with had x number of users on y number of dialup lines, with z webservers, mailservers, etc. The most exciting thing that happened was when some junior tech would issue "killall -9" on a Solaris box.

Since I leapt into the pr0n company, I've had to deal with traffic loads that would have caved the ISP's servers in. I had to change my way of thinking, write my programs leaner, always look for ways to optimize, etc, in ways that I hadn't had to do before. Unoptimized solutions didn't rear their heads when you were dealing with 500,000 page views a day, but toss 5,000,000 pages views at it, and suddenly you learn the error of your ways rather quickly.

I deal rarely with the content side of things, I am more into the nuts and bolts, the backends, the scripts, the webservers, etc. I've increased their stability and reliability along the way with things I learned at the ISP, and I've learned several new things from sheer volume of traffic seen. When I do decide to move on, I think I'll be better for it, and will probably be better for it, always approaching solutions from the perspective that I have to build the solution to handle 5,000,000 hits a day, scaling up from there.

So a foray into the porn world is not all sleaze, and it's not all bad. While there are companies out there that are just in it for a quick buck, and will do everything that they can (spam, etc) to get it, there are also ones that are in it for the long haul, pay their employees well (I'm making more than I made at the ISP, I get semi-annual reviews with atleast inflationary increases, etc) and try to be good net.citizens. As the comment said, check the contracts closely, and research the company completely

before making the leap, but don't automatically turn it down because it has the word "porn" attatched.

killall exists on both linux and solaris boxes but they do different things.

On linux killall kills off processes by name. So if you ran a killall -9 with no process name, you would end up with a usage message.

On solaris boxes killall kills all active process. You don't specify anything other than the signal to send. So if you ran killall -9 you would kill everything and you would kill it in such away that none of them would be able to catch the signal and close cleanly.

I've noticed that even some of the larger porn providers, like vivid video or someone is actually pretty small scale. That's when compared to some other web sites I've seen. Given that and the tremendous amount of problems you must have with chargebacks and low pay for banner ads, I have to wonder if you can actually make *that* much money in porn.

Perhaps some commentary from a few people who run porn sites that hang out here, like ninenine.com would clear up a bit of this question I've had.

Also, does anyone have any firsthand experience knowing how many people actually pay for subscriptions to sites like danni.com or anything like that?

But you know what: Porn in itself (in moderation as everything) isn't something bad, the chances of sex / porn hurting someone is way less than a gun... After all, sex could create live and not destroy it, hardly something you can say about a gun, now can you?

Besides: If the US would actually loosen up a bit about the Sex issue, maybe you guys could stop showing around all your new high tech guns with which you are "protecting" the world.

Of course its the oldest profession in the book. With the car, came sex in the car. With the phone came phone-sex. With the telegraph came, well, I am sure something sexual. With./ came goatsex. Sex is the most fundemental part of everything we do. Is it suprizing that porn is the largest employeer on the net?

Seriously? Who's really making money now? Porn. Who's going to be making money tomorrow? Porn. Who's got the kind of pageviews and such that advertisers would kill for? Porn. Who's going to have that paycheck for you next year too? Porn. It's pretty logical to me. Just because portions of society (portions which, I might add, aren't often of the same views as those who work in the tech industry) consider porn immoral doesn't mean it's not going to make a buck.

I think it's good news personally. You can read goatse.cx trolls while coding for a goatsex website. What could be better?

Although he started full time in October, Jon hasn't told his family. "My mom would kill me if she knew."

I can only wonder how many people involved in the tech sector are going to be questioned by their mothers after they have read this article. "Jon, son, you know you can always come to us if you need help, financially. Are you selling porn?"

"It could have changed but the story has not note about people that have come out of porn in to the main stream."

That's because right now the porn industry is growing but the "mainstream" (by which the author apparently means "anything that isn't porn") on the whole isn't. Once other types of e-commerce pick up again, I'm sure there will be plenty of former porn-site workers making the moves based on the usual reasons people change jobs: salary, benefits, location, etc.

And if I were running an e-commerce site, of any kind, I'd regard a background of running porn sites to look pretty damned good on an applicant's resume, for all the reasons mentioned by the author of the parent post. Porn sites are high-volume, high-demand sites with constantly changing inventory. Any business owner who's prejudiced against people who at one time worked in porn is probably going to lose out on some very good people.

I was struck by the constant mentions of low pay. I suspect it's because porn industry workers are too accepting of the stigma society places on them to stand up for their rights in public. Too bad. The profits in porn for the business owners are, so to speak, obscene -- I'd love to see some serious unionization and bargaining so the workers could get a piece of the, so to speak, pie.

Um, Traci Lords? [imdb.com] Yeah, everyone knows she used to do dirty stuff, but she *ahem* worked the angles. And now she's doing stuff that's mainstream enough to be called a comedy. [imdb.com]

I'm not going to waste any bits trying to help you understand the rest of the ways you're trolling, because there are already many posts modded higher regarding the doctrine of personal denial and its methods of transmission from one generation to another.

All I will say is, there is a huge difference between getting paid to stand there and shoot footage of people fucking, and being the guy who implements the security of the user DB that just happens to make money by accumulating and/or distributing pictures of people fucking.

wow, i wish I had a mod point left for this post. Look at FC... [fuckedcompany.com] you'll see lots of Pets.Com, but Kara's doesn't seem to be there. And I think that Pud would tell all of us about that one as soon as he became aware of it...

Let me preface my comment by emphasizing that I don't care if someone I don't know wants to work in porn, watch porn, have porn for breakfast, or whatever - he or she is welcome to do so. This is totally not about my opinion regarding whether those things are right or wrong (although I do have one).

Anyway, everyone seems to be implying that there is nothing wrong with this trend, and that tech workers moving to the Porn industry are making a great choice, but consider this:

Sooner or later, the current economic slowdown will turn around and tech workers will have lots of options in more traditional fields again. My opinion is that those who go to work in the porn industry now, will find their resumes are significantly tainted should they ever decide they want to go back to a more mainstream employer. I know some people will say the world is more enlightened, and companies aren't all stodgy and traditional anymore, so they wouldn't discriminate against a candidate with an employment history that included, say Hustler, but they're kidding themselves if they think traditional companies would choose the ex-hustler candidate over someone else if all other qualifications were more or less equal. If I got laid off, I think I would beat the bushes a little harder, consider moving to a non-saturated region, and do whatever else I had to do to avoid closing future doors for myself.

Sorry I had to, but really it can't look good on a resume, the fact that you posted your side of working for a p0rn site shows that most people look down on it. In high school I took TV production, one thing the teacher would say ( out side of class) is that once you were in porn there was no getting out. It could have changed but the story has not note about people that have come out of porn in to the main stream.

Last August, I was a contract consultant... things were good, then slowly, the market started drying up (everyone was starting to buckle down on new projects).

I figured it was a good time to look for a permanent job. I interviewed with quite a few dot com types, from Boston to SF to Fort Lauderdale, I finally went with a porn hosting company. About 3/4 of the other places I interviewed with are out of business or have had some serious layoffs. The place I work at has actually grown (and is profitable!)

I don't see my family complaining anymore now that I have job security in the sin industry vs working for a conservative type company and getting laid off.

Not necessarily in front of the
cameras, however, but read those contracts carefully.

So would it be worse to be in front of the camera and get laid regularly, or would it be worse to be in the server room all day putting together websites with highly erotic content and never getting any?

I'm not sure if Timothy's comment meant we should be looking for contracts with on-camera time, or if he meant we should beware lest they suck us incredibly virile and physically attractive geeks into the horrid world of *GASP* Adult Entertainment.

Trust me. About 6 months ago I interviewed with one of the larger (if not largest) 'net based porn companies for a sys-admin position. Given that porn seems to be the only industry that makes money on the web I was expecting a decent salary offer and a good working environment. Wrong! Porn companies make money on the web because their costs are low; They hire cheap labour, rent cheap offices etc..

If you want to work as a sys-admin for $24k US out of a dingy warehouse in the bad part of town then I've got the industry for you.

Finally, an article about Techies and Pr0n, and what, 195 messages? C'mon. After all these goats.ex posts, this is all? Evidently, pr0n isn't all that interesting to slashdotters.

Either that, or it's reminded most of them to download their daily dose, or are submitting resumes like mad ("Damn, it's in formatted in Word, with fonts and everything and I have to copy and paste it into a text box!")

Well, here's some free pr0n anyway (.)(.) Send $5 to PO Box 555, Zeeland Michigan, and you get to see it in color!

Executives at the area's leading adult entertainment firms report a surge of resumes and telephone inquiries from disillusioned techies

There's a reason for this.....after you work 60-70 hours a week, or more, your girlfriend/wife leaves you for not putting enough time into the relationship...then the company flunks, and guess what: now you're out of money and no girlfriend....and women don't like men w/o money

It's a fact of life that porn is recession proof. It always has been, it always will be. While consumers' desires for other goods and services may ebb and flow, man's libido will never diminish. It's not news really, just reality.

Well, while I'm not saying that you're not worth what you're getting paid, I will say that a big reason that porn businesses (even on the web) stay profitable is because they generally keep a hard eye on the bottom line. Yeah, there's a lot of money flowing in and out, but you're not going to find a lot of porn people squandering it. While lots of dot-com companies like pets.com, and others blow their money on big salaries, and lots of marketing, porn people generally keep costs down. It's a mature, and very aggressive market that requires costs to be as low as possible.

Actually, we DO have our own content at http://ninenine.com/free_pics.asp [ninenine.com]. All of that content was purchased and licensed. As we continue to ramp up, we'll have more there. Yes, we have thousands of links to content on other sites, we DO NOT steal content. Just wanted to clear that up. Thanks.

Actually, yes, there is a LOT of money to be made. But that being said, it's not an easy business to run. There's a lot of competition out there. Like any other industry the 80/20 rule applies. 20% of all companies probably make 80% of the money. A lot of people give it a shot, but then back out when they realize that like anything else, it does take a LOT of work to make it profitable. People like Persian Kitty [persiankitty.com] and Green Guy [link-o-rama.com] were average people who just persevered, and now they're millionaries. So yes, it's possible, but it's not easy. Trust me, it takes a LOT of work, a LOT of luck, and a little something different to make a buck.

Actually, nope, I don't think that they do get paid all that well. The big stars do, but not as well as 'traditional' Hollywood stars, and most people aren't big stars. Plus, think about it: How much would YOU have to get paid to go to work every day and fuck beautiful women? I don't know about you, but I'd work for damn near free.

Sex has sold [skepticsan...dbible.com] for years, since biblical times. Probably before that, too....

Caveman One: Unf Unga Boog Ooog Looga (Your girlfriend looks very alluring, I will pay you one million boar's teeth for one night with her)Caveman Two: Onga Bonga Loo Fung Dunga Bunga (I cannot let you do that to the woman I love, However I will sell you rights to draw a figure of her on your wall, surrounded by advertisements and banners, and sell tickets to people to come view that picture

It is fairly easy to get a porn site up and running and make a little profit. You pay a nice looking girl $100 to do a photo shoot, plus a couple hundred for the photographer since they usually cost more than the girls.

The girl does a photo shoot for a few hours, you get your pictures, post a couple to newsgroups with the URL, get some teaser pictures on your website. Then put up some banners, offer more content for $5.95 a month and that's it! You can even host the pictures from geocities or somewhere although you would have to change them around since Yahoo doesn't like that sort of stuff. So you make a couple hundred a month in banner ads, mayby another couple hundred from subscribers. As long as bandwidth bills don't get yah, you can turn a profit. Then, rinse and repeat until you have more content. Just make sure you don't have so much content that subscribers can't pay for all your bandwidth.

Keep getting original content and maybe increase the price every couple months. You can make a profit of a couple thousand a month with little work which is enough to be able to relax and take long vacations! Wow, this is starting to sound like that crap spam email I get promising easy money.. My apologies!:)

Head hunters [adultstaffing.com] from the porn industry? I wonder if they sound as sleazy as media portrays them. Personally I know porn sites make extreme amounts of money, the problem I think of regarding that market is, there are way too many porn sites out there to even think that "this particular" company is going to make it in the long run.

I wouldn't jump ship unless my options included Alley Bagget on Monday, Jenna Jameson on Tuesday, Racquel Darian on Wednesday, Anna Nicole Smith on Thursday, and Jenna again on Friday.

The internet is widespread throughout the US, in spite of the recent economic downturn that has yet to really stop. It seems that with each passing day, porn takes up a larger part of the internet economy. Do you think that this "porn boom" will help change opinions about sex in the US?

According to the link, it says that out of all the users on the internet, 33% are brand new (less than a year), and 60% of that are women. 60% * 33% = 20%. Of course, this says nothing about any previous gender ratios, so it could mean anything.

"the average age of net users is up too."

As is, I don't see how that means anything. If five years ago, the average net user was 18, and now the average user is 23, it's still the same people. All it means is that we've aged five years in the past five years.